Introduction to The Merchant of Venice (pp.

1-1 59) is resolutely committed to the phraseology of 1 980s cultural materialism: the word recuperate and its cognates (not in the sense of getting well but of recovering something lost) is used five times, ideology and its cognates nineteen SHAKESPEARE 329 times. Each section of the introduction is a short essay on a theme, and many of them can be rather too easily summed up in a sentence that Drakakis draws out into several pages. Thus 'Venice: Myth and Reality' (pp. 3-8) tells us how Elizabethans perceived this exotic place, 'The Menace of Money' (pp. 8-12) gives a general introduction to the play's ideas about what money is and what it can do, and 'Usury or the Butler's Box (pp. 1 2-17) offers more on what early moderns thought of usury, although with no explanation of the term Butler's Box, which comes up in an early book that Drakakis quotes. More substantial is the section 'Marlowe, Shakespeare and the Jews' (pp. 1 7-30) on the religious and economic contexts. Drakakis refers to Shylock as 'the Jew', Lancelot Gobbo as 'Clown' and Old Gobbo as 'Giobbe' without referring the reader forward to a place where these choices are explained. Drakakis's argument is much concerned with 'otherness', the idea that what Jewishness represented was the troubled incapacity of Christianity to do all that it would-especially in relation to economic development-for which the Jews as scapegoats had to be punished. No explanation is offered for a reference to 'the allegedly sexually inadequate Lancelet' (p. 26), nor why he here becomes 'Lancelet' instead of Clown or Lancelot.